The Lone Writer’s Guide

The Lone Writer's Guide is one of the projects happening at San Francisco Write the Docs.

• Introduction
• Current Status
• Contents
• Contributing

Introduction

If you're the new sole writer at a company and you've inherited a mess, what should you do first? What decisions (and trade-offs) must you address right away? What milestones should you hit in the first 30, 60, and 90 days?

We started a guide for people who are thrown into the deep end to give them a plan for the first 90 days. This hackathon continues that work.

Everyone has something to share, so join us for this project if you are (or have been) the sole writer at a company or a writer with lots of experience.

Current Status

This guide is in active development and has not yet been published.

Contents

We’re still working out how we want to organize what we’ve got so far, so this is very much a work in progress. If you see a better way to organize our contents, please open an issue or a pull request!

• Audit Existing Content
• Authoring Tools
• Authoring Tools Changing
• Content Review Procedures
• Create a Style Guide
• Create Technical Glossary
• Doc Team Procedures
• Expectations
• Getting Everyone To Write
• Identify Your Audiences
• Identify Your SMEs
• Identify Your Stakeholders
• Inheriting A Mess
• Quick Wins
• Resources
• Static Site Generators
• Technical Product Summary
• Testing Docs
• Topic Patterns
• Working With Your Manager

Contributing

You can contribute in several ways:

• You can edit these pages in your browser
• If you feel like a challenge, you can also Fork or clone the repo and work offline, but it's not necessary. There are some helpful instructions below, if you want to try that.
• Open an issue here in GitHub. This allows you to report a bug or make a suggestion without having to make the changes yourself. See the GitHub docs: Creating an Issue.

Before Contributing

Before you contribute, please:

• Review the docs to get an idea of what has been done so far.
• If you already have a GitHub account, log in. Otherwise, sign up.

Edit in Your Browser the Easy Way

1. Use the edit button to start.
   1. It's the one at the upper right with a symbol that looks like a pencil.
2. When finished, scroll down to click Commit Changes.
3. Click Create Pull Request.

Edit in Your Favorite Text Editor

If you want to do things the hard way, you can use the green button to clone the repo. That would allow you to work offline and in your favorite text editor. For help with Git, refer to the official Git documentation. You can also download a GUI interface, if you'd prefer to work in a windowized environment, rather than the command line. If you prefer that, take a look at Git's guide to GUI apps.